In his brochure, Poltava tried to establish an image of the OUN-UPA that contradicted Soviet propaganda. This nationalist image was no less problematic than the Soviet one. With the destruction of the OUN-UPA in the early 1950s the romanticized image of the national revolutionaries continued to exist in western Ukraine, mainly at the family level or in informal circles. This image was passed from generation to generation, for example, through songs that parents sang to their children, fairy tales, or romantic stories about the OUN, UPA, Bandera and Shukhevych, who had heroically fought against the Soviet oppressors for a free Ukraine and died the death of martyrs. “My mother sang me Ukrainian insurgent songs to put me to bed. And we were not an unusual family. Thus the cult of Bandera and the Banderites was very strong among us, already before the fall of communism,” the leading Ukrainian historian Iaroslav Hrytsak, born in 1960, said in an interview in early 2013.[1892]
Because romanticizing or expressing admiration for Bandera or the OUN-UPA was punishable, and anyone who did so in public could be accused of counterrevolutionary propaganda, the Providnyk became, over time, a symbol of resistance. Simultaneously every black spot on the image of the OUN-UPA and Bandera was whitewashed. The nationalist propaganda that came to Ukraine from abroad was limited but also had some impact on the Bandera image. At their publishing house Cicero, at Zeppelinstrasse 67 in Munich, the ZCh OUN reprinted Bandera’s Perspectives of the Ukrainian Revolution, bound with the cover of From the History of the Collectivization of Agriculture in the Western Oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR, and smuggled it to Soviet Ukraine, where it was introduced into library catalogues.[1893]
An interesting question related to the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine and the Bandera myth was the person and cult of the Ukrainian communist writer, Iaroslav Halan, who was born in Dynów in 1902, attended a high school in Przemyśl (Peremyshl’), and joined the KPZU in 1924. Between 1923 and 1928, Halan studied in Vienna and Cracow. He subsequently worked as a teacher of Polish in a Ukrainian high school in Luts’k (Łuck), from which he was soon dismissed because of his communist affiliation, and from then on he earned his living as a journalist. He was arrested in 1936 and 1937. His wife studied in Kharkiv and was killed during one of Stalin’s purges. This, however, did not change Halan’s attitude to the Soviet Union and communism. The most important phase of his career began toward the end of the Second World War and accelerated afterwards when he worked for the newspaper Radians’ka Ukraїna as a journalist, and in particular as a correspondent at the Nuremberg trial.[1894]
Halan wrote a range of articles, essays, and short stories, which condemned Ukrainian nationalism and the Greek Catholic Church. In that way he attacked the two most important components of western Ukrainian or Galician Ukrainian identity. At the same time, the Ukrainian communist writer legitimized the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, the Soviet terror against civilians, and the dissolution of the Greek Catholic Church. Because of his talent and the ideological usefulness of his writing, Halan became perhaps the most important western Ukrainian writer and intellectual after the war. His works frequently appeared first as newspaper articles or pamphlets and were then collected and published as brochures or in anthologies.[1895] Although Halan was a convinced communist and believed in the Soviet Union and “Moscow’s civilizing mission,” he criticized some aspects of Soviet policies in western Ukraine, for example the superiority of the Russian language and the destruction of cultural artifacts. The Soviet authorities regarded him as a person who “cannot be trusted blindly.”[1896]
On 24 October 1949, Halan was murdered at the desk in his apartment by means of a hatchet. After the killing, a wave of repression was directed against the Lviv intelligentsia. Many students were dismissed from the universities.[1897] According to Stashyns’kyi, who was slipped into the UPA underground by the MGB to find Halan’s murderer, Halan was killed by Mykhailo Stakhur. The UPA partisan came to Halan’s apartment together with Ilarii Lukashevych, a student who visited the writer regularly. The guards, who were permanently stationed at the entrance to Halan’s apartment building, admitted Stakhur because of his companion. Stakhur was arrested in July 1951 and at the end of a trial on 15 and 16 October 1951, he was sentenced to death and executed on the same day.[1898]
Stakhur’s trial was a typical Soviet show trial. Several Soviet Ukrainian newspapers published the identical reports of the trial, which confirmed the common Soviet bias concerning Ukrainian nationalism.[1899] According to the Soviet Ukrainian press, the judge came to the conclusion that the assassination was organized “on instructions from the Vatican.” Stakhur was ordered by his superiors to kill the communist writer because Halan “spoke out against the Vatican and, during the Nuremberg trial, demanded that Stepan Bandera be extradited and put on trial.” Stakhur also admitted that he collected secret information for “Stepan Bandera, who passed them to Anglo-American intelligence.” The prosecutor demanded “only one judgment, one punishment—death on the gallows [because] a rabid dog should be destroyed.”[1900]
After his death Halan became a Soviet martyr, even more popular than during his life. From 1951 onward, several biographies of Halan appeared.[1901] His publications were reprinted many times. Volumes with propagandistic pamphlets, essays, and poems, directed against the “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists,” honored Halan in their titles.[1902] In Lviv, Kiev, Kharkiv, and other cities, streets were named after him. In 1954 the film We Cannot Forget This appeared, which told the story of a writer named Alexander Garmash and was based on Halan’s life.[1903] In 1973 the film Until the Last Minute also portrayed Halan’s “heroic” life.[1904] On 24 October 1960, a museum devoted to Halan was opened in the four-room apartment at 18 Hvardiis’ka Street, in which the writer was murdered. In 1972 a monument to Halan was unveiled in Lviv.[1905]
The museum familiarized visitors with the writer’s life, writings, political activism, and devotion to the idea of communism, with the help of such items as his signature, manuscripts, pictures, letters, illustrations from his publications, personal belongings, and furniture. Each room in the four-room museum apartment was devoted to a different period of Halan’s life. The furniture and smaller objects stood, according to the museum-guide booklet, exactly as they had when Halan lived in the apartment. One of the most important items was Halan’s desk, at which he was murdered by a “Vatican agent,” as the museum-guide booklet informed visitors. The newspapers Pravda and L’vovskaia pravda and the manuscript of his last work, The Greatness of a Liberated Person (Velych vyzvolenoї liudyny), lay on the desk. They bore three spots of Halan’s blood, which, according to the museum booklet, fell on them when Halan was hit with a hatchet on 24 October 1949.[1906]
Exhibits in the fifth room of the museum were collected according to the motto “The Writer Prolongs His Struggle.” The museum booklet described it as follows:
Although Ia. Halan died, his fervent artistic word lives and operates. In Ukraine alone Halan’s works were republished fifty times, altogether more than two million copies. They are popular not only in the Soviet Union but also abroad. In addition to his many publications that had already appeared in the fraternal republics of our Motherland, the writer’s works appeared in German, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, and other languages of the countries of the socialist camp.[1907]
Like the OUN and UPA, Soviet propaganda presented victims of their political opponents as heroes and martyrs. “Having learnt the practice of burning people alive from the German camps,” Pavlo Zhytenko wrote, “Banderites tied an old forester to a tree, brought a bunch of dry branches, set them on fire, and the unfortunate victim of the Banderite hangmen died the death of a national martyr.”[1908] Though the account may have been true, since the OUN and UPA often applied sadistic methods to kill people, one should differentiate between the description of an event and the narrative stylization of their victims. In a sense, all Red Army soldiers who died in the struggle against Nazi Germany or the OUN-UPA were represented by Soviet propaganda as heroes and martyrs. Their death was used to legitimize the Stalinist system and the incorporation of Ukraine in the Soviet Union. Similarly, some NKVD personnel who died while taking action against the nationalist underground were commemorated as martyrs or heroes.
The two best-known individuals turned into Soviet heroes and martyrs in post-war Ukraine were the Red Army general Nikolai Vatutin and the Soviet intelligence agent and partisan Nikolai Kuznetsov. Vatutin died in a hospital in Kiev six weeks after he was injured by a UPA partisan on 28 February 1944. Kuznetsov was killed on 9 March 1944 in a fight against UPA partisans. Not only were several streets, schools, museums, and theatres named after Vatutin and Kuznetsov but also two cities: one founded in 1947 in Cherkasy oblast and known as Vatutine and one founded in 1973 in the Rivne oblast and known as Kuznetsovsk. A monument dedicated to Vatutin was unveiled in Kiev in 1948; one to Kuznetsov in Lviv, in 1962.[1909]
In western Ukraine, as in other parts of the Soviet Union, graveyards for the fallen soldiers of the Red Army were established, as were monuments, and memorial complexes in their honor, in almost every city, town, and village. Several were erected in cities such as Lviv. The most popular image of a Soviet politician, present in every Ukrainian town, city, and many villages, was that of Lenin. The local authorities took care of monuments devoted to Soviet politicians and the Red Army. Annual memorial celebrations were organized at the monuments, for example on 9 May, Victory Day. It was however forbidden to commemorate the OUN members and UPA partisans who were killed by the Red Army, the destruction battalions, and the NKVD. According to Soviet ideology, the OUN activists and UPA partisans were killed as bandits and enemies of the Soviet people.[1910] The same policies were applied to civilians killed by the NKVD who were not in the OUN-UPA but who either helped the OUN-UPA because the Ukrainian nationalists intimidated them, or who did not help the OUN-UPA at all but were accused of belonging to or helping them. Regardless of their actual status, all such victims of NKVD and other Soviet terror were presented by Soviet propaganda as Banderites, fascists, collaborators, bourgeois nationalists, capitalists, kulaks, and essentially as enemies of the Soviet Union and therefore the Ukrainian people.
In western Ukraine, the KPU built not only monuments that heroized the Red Army and thus indirectly condemned the OUN-UPA but also monuments to the victims of the OUN-UPA or to those who died in the struggle against them. Such monuments were erected in western Ukraine from the early 1950s. In March 1957, as the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution approached, K. Krepkyi, head of the propaganda section of the Lviv Oblast Committee of the KPU, wrote to M. K. Lazurenko, secretary of the Oblast Committee of the KPU that in the entire Lviv oblast there were only six monuments to “combatants of the Great Patriotic War and Soviet activists who died in the struggle against the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.”[1911] After this complaint, hundreds of relevant monuments were erected.
A number of monuments to people who were killed by the OUN-UPA had plaques with inscriptions such as “Eternal glory to the heroes who gave their lives for the glory and independence of our motherland.”[1912] Other monuments named the “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” as responsible for the killings. Depending on the district, monuments in the Lviv oblast that were explicitly or implicitly devoted to the victims of the OUN-UPA constituted between 10 and 80 percent of all monuments in the late 1960s. In most districts, however, they did not exceed 20 percent.[1913]
In the village of Strilkiv, Stryi district, the unveiling of a monument with the inscription “In memory of our fellow-villagers who died in the struggle against the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists and German-fascist occupiers” was planned for 9 May 1967. The monument was devoted to people from the villages of Strilkiv, Berezhnytsia, Lotatnyky, Slobidka, and Mertiuky who “were murdered by the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists at the time of establishing Soviet authorities and kolkhoz structures” or who had “died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945).” In Holobutiv, Stryi district, a monument “in honor of the first kolkhoz chairman who was murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was erected in 1957. In the village of Bratkivtsi, Stryi district, a similar monument devoted to Mykola Dubyk, the first kolkhoz chairman, was unveiled in the same year. In 1961 in the village of Dubliany, Sambir district, a three-meter-high (ten-foot) figure of a combatant was erected for those who were “murdered by the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” In the village of Sukhodoly, Brody district, a monument with the inscription “Evstakhii Petrovych Ostrovs’kyi 1928–1945. To the faithful Komsomol member who was murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was erected in the cemetery in 1965. In the village of Kornychi, Sambir district, a concrete pyramid-like monument two and a half meters (eight feet) high “in the memory of those who were murdered by German fascist occupiers and Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was erected in 1963.[1914]
For the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the erection of a monument to the “teacher Iosyp Hryhorovych Karl, murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was planned for the village of Zaluzhany, Sambir region. In the town of Turka, Lviv oblast, a four-meter-high (thirteen-foot) obelisk was erected in 1959. A plaque with names of “members of the Komsomol from the Turka district who died in the fight against the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was affixed to the monument. In the Turka district, monuments to the “glorious soldiers-compatriots, who died at the front during the Great Patriotic War in 1941–1945 and also those who died in the struggle against OUN members,” were erected in the villages of Bitlia in 1965, Hnyla in 1966, Husne in 1966, Verkhne in 1965, Krivka in 1966. In Pustomyty, a district center in the Lviv oblast, a monument devoted to those who died in the struggle against the “German fascists and Ukrainian nationalists between 1941 and 1948” was erected in 1955. Another monument in Pustomyty, devoted to these who “struggled for the establishment of Soviet power and who were killed by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist bands” was planned for 1967. At the cemetery in Stryi a monument devoted to “the Hero of the Soviet Union who was killed by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was erected in 1966. A monument was planned to be erected by 1 June 1967 in Skole, in honor of Mykhailo Pon, a “martyred” member of the KPZU, who was “murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” on the Makivka mountain in 1933. At the Vasyl’ Stefanyk collective farm in Iaseniv, Brody district, and the Taras Shevchenko collective farm in Leshniv, also in the Brody district, monuments were erected to “fellow villagers who died in the Great Patriotic War or were murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” In the village of Velykyi Liubin’, Horodok district, a memorial plaque was unveiled in 1966 with the inscription “In this place on 26 April 1945 Stepan Hryhorovych, the first head of the village council of Velykyi Liubin’, was murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists. Eternal Glory to the faithful son of the people.” In the village of Zvertiv, Nesterov (Zhovkva) district, a three-meter-high (ten-foot) statue of “woman-mother” was unveiled in 1965. The monument was devoted to the “party and Soviet activists who were murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” In the village of Turynka, district Nesterov, one monument to “fellow villagers murdered by the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was unveiled in 1962 and another one in 1967. In Pidbuzh, Drohobych district, a monument to soldiers “fallen during the liberation of the village” was erected in 1951. Another one to “fallen activists murdered by the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was erected close to the cultural center and unveiled on 9 May 1967. In the village of Volia, Drohobych district, a 2.7-meter-high (nine-foot) obelisk was erected and unveiled in 1955 at the grave of the “secretary of the Komsomol organization, Mariia Svyshch, who was martyred by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.”[1915]
Between 1965 and 1967, monuments to individuals who were “murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” were unveiled in thirty-five villages of the Drohobych district. In the village of Kustyn, Radekhiv district, a statue of “Mother-Motherland” (maty bat’kivshchyna) who is holding a wounded soldier in her lap was unveiled in March 1966. The monument bore a plaque with names of “fourteen people who in 1941–1945 were killed by the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” In the Iavoriv district, the KPU planned to erect six obelisks and one monument on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, to those who “had fallen in the struggle against the German-fascist occupiers and the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” In Mykolaïv, a monument to the “glory of the soldiers who fell during the liberation of the town during the Great Patriotic War and for the Soviet activists who were murdered by the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists during the struggle for the establishment of the Soviet power” was erected in 1946. In the Zolochiv district, six monuments in different villages for “soldiers and fellow villagers who fell in the Great Patriotic War or were murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” were erected in 1965 and in 1967. In Boryslav a monument to “soldiers who were murdered by Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” was erected in 1968.[1916]
This enumeration of monuments, which could be prolonged, illustrates that the Soviet authorities tried hard, particularly in villages and small towns, to convince the local residents that the OUN and UPA murdered local civilians and that nationalist insurgents were “traitors” and “enemies of the Ukrainian people.” Local Ukrainians exposed to this propaganda knew from their own experience that the nationalist insurgents terrorized the local communities and killed civilians. However, they also remembered the Soviet terror, which was at times even harsher than the nationalist one. Unlike the nationalists’ crimes, those of the Soviets were completely absent from the official memory discourse. In reaction to this, western Ukrainians launched an informal anti-Soviet rebellious discourse on the subject of the OUN-UPA. This discourse transformed the OUN-UPA into a symbol of resistance. With time, the criminal, authoritarian, and deeply antidemocratic nature of the Ukrainian nationalist movement was buried in oblivion, and the Ukrainian nationalists reappeared, especially in the late 1980s, as anti-Soviet freedom fighters.[1917]
From early 1950 onward, an increasing number of monographs and essay collections on Bandera and related subjects appeared, written by historians, journalists, political activists, and members of the Communist Party. There were also joint publications by academics and famous authors, for example Mykhailo Rudnyts’kyi, a professor at Lviv University, with Stalin Prize laureate Vladimir Beliaev. This trend continued until the late 1980s. All official publications in the Soviet Union about Banderites and Ukrainian nationalists were written to extol the Soviet Union and to condemn the Banderites and other enemies. The content and meaning of the publications was monitored by the Soviet censorship.[1918]
Some Soviet Ukrainian historians and writers read and commented on publications from the Ukrainian diaspora such as the newspapers Svoboda, Shliakh peremohy, and Nova dumka. They also mocked the political actions of such diaspora organizations as the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (Ukraїns’kyi Kongresovyi Komitet Ameryky, UKKA) and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (Kongres Ukraїntsiv Kanady, UCC).[1919]
Authors in the Soviet Union who wrote political pamphlets frequently claimed that they presented only pure and self-evident facts. The majority of the publications, however, did not quote any sources and did not follow academic rules. The Ukrainian Soviet author and most popular victim of the Ukrainian nationalists, Halan, was the intellectual guru of several Soviet writers and historians. Klym Dmytruk for example, a prolific Soviet writer, ended his essay collection Without Homeland, which was translated into English, by citing Halan: “No matter how Stets’ko, Slipyi, Pobihushchyi and other such traitors go out of their way to impede progress, they will never succeed. The renegades should remember the words addressed to them by Yaroslav Halan: ‘They will die like traitors at some foreign back door.’”[1920]
Soviet historians and writers had access to the archives and were familiar with such crucial documents as “The Struggle and Activities of the OUN in Wartime.” For example, Beliaev knew about the blacklists that the OUN-B activists prepared before the beginning of the “Ukrainian National Revolution.”[1921] Soviet ideology, however, had absolute priority over knowledge of history. The only archival documents quoted by historians were those that did not clash with ideological standards and did not challenge Soviet dogma. One of the most popular Soviet dogmas in the Bandera problematic was the labeling of Theodor Oberländer and the Nachtigall battalion as the killers of the Polish professors in Lviv on the night of 3–4 July 1941. They were also accused of being the main perpetrators of the Lviv pogrom, as well as participants in numerous other massacres after the German invasion of the Soviet Union commenced on 22 June 1941. After Gomułka’s speech in 1959, Oberländer appeared frequently in Soviet publications as a “professional killer.” Some publications stated that Oberländer killed the Polish professors himself, others that Bandera persuaded Oberländer and the Gestapo to kill the Polish professors, or that Hryn’okh, the battalion chaplain, forgave the soldiers their sin of killing the professors.[1922]
Despite the censorship and the obligatory ideological structure, the quality of the Soviet publications about Banderites and Ukrainian nationalists varied. In the 1970s and 1980s a few studies appeared that did not completely ignore the factual side of history. Among their authors were historians such as Vitalii Cherednychenko and V. P. Troshchyns’kyi, who worked in the archives and read English, German, and Polish publications about the Ukrainian nationalists by John Armstrong, Roman Ilnytzkyi, and Ryszard Torzecki. However, even studies written by Cherednychenko, Troshchyns’kyi, and other Soviet historians who did not completely ignore reality are unreliable. In general, their authors mixed Soviet ideology with historical facts. A speech by a communist politician was for them a more reliable source than an original archival document. For example, Cherednychenko quoted Albert Norden, a member of the Central Committee of the SED, as a source to prove that the Nachtigall battalion under the leadership of Oberländer killed 3,000 Poles and Jews in Lviv between 1 and 6 July 1941. And a quotation from Lenin was even better evidence for any claim.[1923]
A very important feature of Soviet propagandist writings was the use of emotional and offensive language. Soviet writers and journalists such as Polikarp Shafeta, Klym Dmytruk, and Vladimir Beliaev wrote stories about Banderites with the simple intention of spreading hatred against the nationalist “enemies of the people.” Describing the Ukrainian nationalists, Soviet writers used a range of derogatory terms. For example, the OUN was called the “criminal OUN gang”; the Banderites, “Banderite hangmen”; Bandera, a “Führer” and not a Providnyk or Vozhd’ as he called himself and was known among his admirers. Stets’ko was called a “doddering dandy” or “insolent mini-führer.” Soviet writers also alleged that the OUN-UPA leaders were rapists and that Shukhevych received medical treatment for a “social disease.”[1924]
Some of the Soviet publications published in English instrumentalized the war crimes committed by the Ukrainian nationalists and condemned the Western bloc for helping war criminals. One of them concerned Dmytro Sachkovs’kyi,
a former police commandant in the town of Kolki, Volin Region, [who] found shelter in Winnipeg, Canada. The fascists greatly evaluated his sadistic skills and commissioned him personally to annihilate the Jewish population. For Sachkovski this was the greatest of joys and satisfaction. One summer day in 1941 he sounded the alarm and with his police band organized a round-up in the town. Having driven several dozen people, women, old men and children to the meadow, he commanded. “Down on your knees!”
The people fearing something horrible to come began to sink to the ground.
“And now graze, chew the grass,” shouted the police commandant and struck everyone in a row with his ramrod.
The children began to cry, the women and old men were asking for pity. But the commandant was just getting into his role.
“You’ve had your feed, Jewish cattle,” shouted Sachkovski in glee. “Now off you go to the river to drink.”
They drove them into the Styr river, water up to their necks and a hail of blows from above. The people, exhausted by all this, began falling into the river.
“Serves you right!” smiled the commandant with satisfaction, overjoyed that he could at least make some fun of human misery. Then everybody was forced out of the water and driven on. Bentsion Stanker was 80 years old and from the horrible torture lost his last strength and could not walk. Sachkovski fired a shot. The old man fell, grasped his chest and began writhing in the sandy road.
“End my misery,” he asked weakly.
“Want an easy death Jew!” sneered Sachkovski. “By evening you’ll die anyway.”
The people from the neighboring villages remember even today how this fascist hanger-on killed a boy from the Jewish family Kalman, who hid from the bandits in the chimney. He kissed the boots of Sachkovski, and asked him to hire him as a herdsman, but not to kill him. The killer was inexorable. Hearing the cries of the child, a woman ran out of the house and began to plead for him. Sachkovski killed her too.
So as you see, another Kovalchuk has escaped overseas from national punishment.[1925]
Banderites such as Sachkovs’kyi were depicted as sadists who killed for pleasure. In Soviet publications, Banderites and other Ukrainian nationalists normally murdered Soviet people, but in English translations, they frequently killed Jews. This allowed Western readers to follow the stories more easily and find them more credible, and it was sometimes a more appropriate description of the event in question. Jewish policemen who collaborated with the Nazis were described as Zionists who served the Germans in order to “save their own skin.” In Soviet publications, Zionists were allied with Ukrainian nationalists. Dmytruk called this alliance a “malignant partnership of the Magen David and the nationalist trident.” Zionists were cruel like the Banderites and killed Jews and other Soviet people in the same way as the Nazis did.[1926] Although antisemitism was officially forbidden in the Soviet Union, in reality it did exist on many levels. In the 1960s, the anti-Zionist campaign directed against Israel presented Zionists and Jews as Nazi collaborators, and Zionism as a “world threat.”[1927]
Soviet Ukrainian movies were another medium that featured Bandera. The leader of the Banderites appeared especially in films about the OUN-UPA, Ukrainian nationalism, and the Second World War. Examples were The Nation Blames,[1928] Since We Remember,[1929] The Killer Is Known,[1930] They Did Not Come Back from the Route,[1931] and Militant Atheists.[1932] The films frequently addressed the subject of the murder of civilians by Ukrainian nationalists during and after the Second World War. Similarly to the Soviet writers, the film directors used the actual atrocities committed by the OUN-UPA and other Ukrainian nationalist formations to spread hatred against all opponents of the Soviet Union who could be denounced as Banderites. They frequently showed people without arms or legs and claimed that they were the victims of the Ukrainian nationalists. Other popular themes in these films included the exhumation of mass graves, and the trials of OUN members or UPA partisans who confessed to killing “Soviet people” on orders from Bandera, Shukhevych, or Kubiiovych.
Banderites also became a popular subject for historical novels and films in communist Poland and Czechoslovakia.[1933] In Poland, fifty-eight academic and popular historical works, fifty autobiographies, and sixty novels about the OUN-UPA and Ukrainian nationalism appeared.[1934] Like the books and films in the Ukrainian SSR, they omitted many central facts that contradicted the official line. A few of them introduced entirely fabricated events. One of the most popular publications in Poland was Fiery Glow in the Bieszczady Mountains by Jan Gerhard (Wiktor Lew Bardach).[1935] It appeared in 1959, was reprinted twelve times, and a total of 500,000 copies were distributed in Poland. In 1961 Ewa Patelska and Czesław Patelski filmed the novel as Artillery Sergeant Kalen, which was frequently screened on television.[1936] The subject of the novel and the film was the defeat of the OUN-UPA and Polish anticommunist armies by Polish Communist troops in the Bieszczady Mountains during the first two years after the Second World War. As in other communist productions, there was enormous polarization between good and brave communists and bad and cruel nationalists. The execution of Polish soldiers taken prisoner is presented in the movie as a ritual execution with a huge hatchet, during which a crowd of UPA partisans screams, “Bandera, Bandera, Bandera!”[1937]
The word “Banderites” was an important component of the Soviet propaganda discourse, at least since 1944. All kinds of people who opposed Soviet policies in some way, or were accused of opposing them, could be classified as Banderites, especially if they had some sympathy for nationalism, or if they or their relatives were in the OUN or the UPA. The word “Banderites” had a very derogatory meaning and basically meant a traitor of the Ukrainian nation, a Nazi collaborator, a fascist, an enemy of the Soviet Union, a murderer with blood on his hands, or a spy for Western intelligence services. The word was frequently used to discredit anti-Soviet dissidents and other political opponents. With time, the term “Banderite” or sometimes just “bandera” became popular not only in Soviet Ukraine but also in other republics and satellite states of the Soviet Union. Danylo Shumuk—who had spent forty-five years in total in Polish, German, and Soviet prisons and camps—was, after his release in 1970, described by a local man in a streetcar in Odessa as a “bandera” because he spoke Ukrainian.[1938]
The eponym Bandera, as in Banderite (banderivets’ or bandera) in the singular and Banderites (banderivtsi) in the plural, was omnipresent in Soviet publications about Ukrainian nationalism. All OUN members, UPA partisans, and frequently all Ukrainian nationalists were described as Banderites. The person Stepan Bandera was also introduced in almost every publication on the Second World War and Ukrainian nationalism but did not have as prominent a role as the eponym. Bandera as a person and politician did not receive much more attention than such prominent “Banderites” as Konovalets’, Stets’ko, and Bul’ba-Borovets’. It is also of interest that there were very few Soviet publications devoted to Stepan Bandera alone.
The prolific Soviet Ukrainian writer Iurii Mel’nychuk claimed about Banderites:
Banderites is an ugly word. It became a synonym for betrayal, selling out, fratricide. Any honest person who has to pronounce the word gets a feeling of outrage, hate, and repulsion toward the hideous monsters. This is a very appropriate feeling because when we talk about Banderites we mean the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, their betrayal and selling out, snakelike ferocity, and hostility towards the Ukrainian people.
Go to the villages of the western Ukrainian oblasts and ask children in the presence of whom the Banderite villains killed their parents; ask old grandmothers who saw Banderites shoot their sons, daughters, grandchildren with German parabellums; go to those villages where Banderites burnt national property, and ask, “Who are the Banderites?” You will hear from old and young the answer, “Bloody killers, fascist brutes, bandits.” ...
The great Soviet people routed the German fascist hordes. Soviet Ukraine liberated itself from the fascist occupation; the people began a peaceful, creative life. And the pitiful remnants, the Ukrainian-German nationalists, the Banderites, went to the forest and emerged from their caves only in the dark nights to kill, hang, burn, rob, to disturb the peaceful life and the socialistic construction. But the people with its angry hand destroyed, crushed the national-fascist Banderite beast.
There are no Banderites anymore. The collective farmer, worker, teacher, and Komsomol member now work peacefully. However, we have no right to stop being careful and alert, we should detect and liquidate every kind of alien propaganda because our repulsive enemies—the Anglo-American imperialists—do not like the peaceful life and creative success of the Soviet people.[1939]
Shortly after Bandera’s assassination, the same Ukrainian Soviet writer wrote the pamphlet At Foreign Thresholds, in which he rewrote the story of Bandera’s life, including the complicated collaboration with the Germans and the Western bloc, and compared him to a dog. The story begins with the dog biting its master, a priest who has taken care of it since it was a pup. The angry master sends the dog away, and it lives on garbage, but after some time the master feels sorry for his dog and takes it in again. However, the Bandera dog and another villainous dog begin raiding and terrorizing the neighborhood, as a result of which the neighbors organize themselves and beat the dog so hard that it barely survives. Other people drive it from the village. Living alone, the dog attacks people and bites them, which it considers to be heroism. Villainous dogs join him. A foreign master lures him with a bone. He calls him by shouting “Wo ist mein Hund? [Where is my dog?],” and the Bandera dog barks “Heil Hitler!” to the master. After some time, the new master begins a war and takes his dog with him. The war is in the territory where the dog grew up, so he “runs ahead of his master, shows him the way, warns him about dangers, guards his peace and life ... snaps at the throats of his countrymen.” On one occasion, the new master shoes a horse. The Bandera dog, very proud of his achievements, comes to him, stretches out his paw, and wants to be shod like the horse. This makes the master so angry that he punishes the dog. When the war ends with dog’s master losing, the dog finds a new master for whom it has to change the tone of its barking, but not to stop barking for another war. After some time, however, the dog irritates the new master, who hits it. One day, on the way to his apartment the dog falls from the steps and dies. Following this fable, Mel’nychuk informed his readers that Stepan Bandera—the “villain of a Ukrainian fascist”—had recently died, and that his fall from the steps was a secret murder, carried out on the orders of Theodor Oberländer, whom Bandera was blackmailing. The author then insinuated, while introducing the term “banderivshchyna” (Bandera movement) that Bandera was the person responsible for the death of 310,000 persons in Lviv after the German attack on the Soviet Union. The same number appeared in the charge against the Nachtigall battalion and Oberländer, which the VNN filed on 31 July 1959 by the Federal State Administration of Justice Department in Ludwigsburg. Mel’nychuk finished his pamphlet with the saying “A dog’s death for a dog.”[1940]
Soviet propaganda took notice of Bandera and the OUN-B in the summer of 1941, but it only started a campaign against the Ukrainian nationalists in early 1944. As a result of various cultural, social and political processes, Soviet propaganda made Bandera into one of the most significant symbols of Ukrainian nationalism. Khrushchev and other Soviet politicians used the term “Banderites” to label all kinds of political opponents. This entirely changed the meaning of the term, which had originally been used by the victims of OUN-UPA mass violence to define its perpetrators. During the early conflict with the Ukrainian nationalists, the Soviet authorities used violence for propaganda purposes. Many “Banderites” were publicly hanged by the NKVD, while rumors were spread that they were in the possession of severed human ears at the time of arrest. The first major propaganda campaign against the Ukrainian nationalists branded the OUN and UPA as “German-Ukrainian nationalists.” It portrayed the Ukrainian nationalist movement as an integral part of the German Empire which continued to fight and terrorize the population even after the defeat of its master. In early 1947 Soviet propaganda began to call the OUN and UPA “bourgeois nationalists” and to emphasize the cooperation of the Ukrainian nationalists with Western countries. Because capitalism in the Soviet discourse was considered to be a deformed variant of fascism, these countries were frequently also labeled as “fascist.” Furthermore Bandera and his movement were depicted as people who had betrayed Ukraine, just as Vlasov, in the Soviet propaganda, had betrayed Russia.
Soviet propaganda turned everybody, including Soviet soldiers and NKVD officers, killed by the Ukrainian nationalists or Germans, into heroes and martyrs. One of the most famous Soviet martyrs killed by the Ukrainian nationalists was the western Ukrainian communist writer Iaroslav Halan. After his assassination a memorial museum was erected in his apartment and monuments were devoted to him. Likewise the Soviet authorities named cities after Soviet generals and partisans who had been killed by the Ukrainian nationalists. They also erected numerous monuments to all kinds of the OUN and UPA victims. The victory over the Ukrainian nationalists became a significant component of the Ukrainian Soviet myth. Together with the denial of Soviet mass violence against the Ukrainian civilians it did not allow for many Ukrainians to mourn their relatives. It thereby impacted upon the memory of the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian nationalists, who in these circumstances were turned by ordinary western Ukrainians into martyrs and anti-Soviet heroes.